High-tech automation is coming to the farm, in the form of robotic tractors that plow fields on their own, for instance, to aerial drones that monitor crops from the sky.

But for the average farmer trying to buy and operate the right machinery, the robotic revolution can be mind-boggling.

“In the past, we would use a pair of pliers, a crescent wrench and a welder. Now we’re using this thing called a computer,” said Gregg Halverson, president of Black Gold Farms, a fourth-generation potato farming empire, speaking to 425 attendees at FORBES’ Reinventing America Agtech Summit in Salinas, Calif.

But not everyone is equipped to use all this data,” Halverson said. “We need to be careful hook our wagons to the right train and ask the right questions so we don’t go running down the wrong paths that we have to backtrack on.”

Ben Chostner, vice president of business development for start-up Blue River Technologies, hopes his company’s new developed LettuceBot, a precision thinning system for lettuce plants, will be one of those machines that will be worth the investment. So far, his company has raised $13 million in venture capital, amid an explosion of Silicon Valley investments in agriculture.

LettuceBot is a robot that uses cameras, sensors and algorithms to make plant-by-plant decisions to increase yield or more precisely apply pesticides - ultimately earning more value from the exact same acre while using less chemicals.

Chostner recognizes that growers don’t have time to evaluate the hundreds of new technologies and robots being introduced in agriculture, which is why Blue River is pursuing a service model: it works with farmers and operates the machines for them “to minimize the mental overhead it takes to understand” what the robot can do. “It can be greatest thing in the world, but if I have to hire three more people and take a week out of my time to understand it, it won’t happen.”

Likewise, big companies like John Deere are trying to find ways to make new technologies accessible and easy to use. “We’ve had to change how we think about technology,” said Cory Reed, senior vice president of Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group. Deere built a mobile platform and an open data platform so farmers can share information with trusted partners in order to keep up with the fast pace of innovations from start-ups like Blue River and other players.

At Deere, he said, it’s not just about building “bigger, faster, stronger machines” any more. In order to help farmers spend fewer dollars per output of crops, they also need machines that are smarter and easier to use. “Being able to plant in 7 days is important,” Reed said. “But you don’t know which 7 days.”